Put a printer shortcut on your Desktop or Dock

byJane de Morattion9th January 2013

Printer shortcuts on your Desktop or in your Dock (or both!) allow you to print quickly just by dragging a file onto the shortcut icon. Do note, though, that this method of printing prints instantly, using the last used settings. That means if you’ve been printing simple text documents and want to print, say, colour photos, you’d have to change the settings first.

To use drag and drop printing, do the following.

Open , System Preferences and select Printers & Scanners. (Depending on what version of OS X you’re using, it might be called Print & Scan or Print & Fax). Your printers and scanners will appear on the left, with various options on the right. Make sure you have the Print tab selected in the right hand panel, as opposed to the Scan or Fax tab, of course!

If you have more than one printer, select the one you want to put on the Desktop (or in the Dock) from the list on the left.

Now for the fun bit (and yes, we should get out more). Just drag the printer’s icon fron the preference pane onto the Desktop or into the Dock. It doesn’t actually matter if you drag the small icon from the list, or the big icon. Both ways work! You can’t do it wrong!

Now you’re all set and can just drag stuff onto this icon for quick printing where the settings for each thing don’t need changing.